(Bloomberg) -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth warned students that the school won’t tolerate antisemitism after flyers at an orientation event provided a link to a project that maps Jewish organizations and expresses the goal of dismantling them.
“I hadn’t intended to start the year with a message like this, but on Monday, an incident occurred that I found troubling,” Kornbluth wrote in a note to students, underlining that the handouts didn’t come from MIT. “While I have repeatedly defended freedom of expression, I must tell you that I found some of the websites cited on the flyers deeply concerning.”
Headlined “Welcome to MIT!,” the leaflets discussed the conflict in the Middle East and offered a list of resources, Kornbluth said. That included a link to the Mapping Project, which lists hundreds of institutions in the Boston area such as synagogues, museums, businesses and police departments.
Kornbluth said she believed the Mapping Project promotes antisemitism, citing statements from its website such as, “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them.”
The Mapping Project didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The incident early in MIT’s new term shows how the unrest that upended US colleges last semester is set to continue reverberating as students return to campus. In the spring, demonstrators held rallies and set up encampments to protest Israel’s retaliatory assault in Gaza in response to an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union.
At nearby Harvard University, students now require permission before setting up tents, art exhibits or chalking on the sidewalk in public spaces. The University of California system announced a ban on encampments and masks used to conceal identities.
Kornbluth has been embroiled in the controversy since testifying before Congress in December about antisemitism on campus. The other two college presidents who testified alongside her, from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, resigned after giving widely criticized testimony about whether calling for the genocide of Jews would breach school regulations.
The head of Columbia stepped down earlier this month, citing campus turmoil.
In her message to students this week, Kornbluth said she wanted to make all students feel at home at MIT.
“I cannot be the arbiter of every disagreement about speech at MIT, and I do not expect to write often about such things,” she said. “But as we start a new year together, it’s important that you hear directly from me.”
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